Texas A&M University's Athletics wanted to ensure nonstop online access to all "Aggie" sports, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Since the AggieAthletics.com portal provides not only scores, events information, articles and photos, but also live audio and video feed, the university needed reliability and constant availability. Working with a local reseller-services provider, MicroAge College Station, Texas A&M Athletics found what they needed with Coyote Point System's Equalizer Series Load Balancer.

Coyote Point's Equalizer Series is known as the "little red box" that can deliver affordable, nonstop availability and accelerated application delivery. The Equalizer Series is a network appliance that performs what's known as "load balancing," a collection of techniques to spread traffic between two or more servers to achieve the best possible utilization, reliability, throughput and accelerated response time.

For MicroAge College Station, the Coyote Point approach is spot on when it comes to equipping its application networking infrastructure solutions for nonstop operations at an affordable price. And for Texas A&M Athletics, the Coyote Point system has become a vital component in ensuring the AggieAthletics.com Web site can handle immense bursts of traffic during sports contests; when up to 50,000 avid Aggie fans access up to 3 million Web pages per hour.

"Texas A&M operates its own athletics portal versus outsourcing, and the site requires a massive amount of complex page delivery," says John Crockett, general manager, MicroAge College Station, a member of the Coyote Point Partner Program. "The Texas A&M Athletics department is very cost-conscious, yet has a very sophisticated network."

The AggieAthletics.com portal provides scoring, event times and locations, post-event articles, photos and press releases, as well as access to live audio and video feeds from CSTV.com, an online source for college sports original broadband content.

To ensure constant online access to Aggie sports, two Coyote Point Equalizer E450si load balancers provide a continuous front end that operates in hot failover mode so that whichever system is active takes traffic from the virtual IP network and routes to one of three HP servers.

The AggieAthletics.com portal provides Aggie fans with access through fiber optic links from the Texas A&M University network hub and to CSTV.com's streaming Webcasts via the Internet.

"We decided to acquire the Coyote Point system from MicroAge College Station because its advanced Layer 7 traffic management for our dynamic PHP-based environment allows us to maintain a very large number of user sessions," says Karl Katske, systems analyst for the Texas A&M Athletics department and systems administrator for AggieAthletics.com. "The Equalizer E450si system has a very attractive price point, and offloading and accelerating SSL traffic saves us even more money on SSL certificates. The Equalizer requires no special training for our engineering staff, which made it extremely easy to install and operate."

Coyote Point's Equalizer Series family of products offer a versatile combination of features for load balancing for high availability, application acceleration, disaster recovery and business continuity. The Equalizer's ease of use is critical for smaller IT departments that don't necessarily have an in-house expert in load balancing and application traffic management.

"Installing the Coyote Point System was click, click, done; the easiest configuration I've ever experienced with a complex piece of hardware," says Katske. "AggieAthletics.com cannot go down, and Coyote Point provides us with the confidence that a situation like that won't ever happen."